A "Thing" in the "Internet of Things"; a processing unit that is capable of connecting to the internet and exchanging data with the cloud. Devices are often called "smart devices" or "connected devices." They communicate two types of data: telemetry and state.

Telemetry

All event data (for example, measurements about the environment) sent from devices to the cloud. Telemetry data sent from a device to the cloud is called "device telemetry event" data. You can use Google Cloud Big Data Solutions to analyze telemetry data.

Components

The main components of Cloud IoT Core are the device manager and the protocol bridges:

A device manager for registering devices with the service, so you can then monitor and configure them

Two protocol bridges (MQTT and HTTP) that devices can use to connect to Google Cloud Platform

Device telemetry data is forwarded to a Cloud Pub/Sub topic, which can then be used to trigger Cloud Functions. You can also perform streaming analysis with Cloud Dataflow or custom analysis with your own subscribers.

The following diagram summarizes the service components and the flow of data: